Prof. John Banzhaf: Trump’s Victory Can Help Wussified College Students Grow Up

Professor John Banzhaf, public interest law professor at George Washington University, appeared on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about his latest article, “Trump May Trim PC Excesses and Wussification on Campuses.”

SiriusXM host Alex Marlow ran through some of the more ridiculous methods people on the Left have employed to cope with their emotional devastation after the 2016 election, most of which involve treating grown men and women like small children, giving them toys and puppies to work out their anxiety.

“I’m not at all surprised that they’re getting so upset about political developments because they do this in other areas,” said Prof. Banzhaf. “I ran across one where a woman actually went for counseling because her roommate used the word ‘bitch’ with respect to her. Two other students ran in for counseling because they saw a mouse, and they needed counseling.”

“Others have talked about a national pantywaist crisis, political correctness run amok, a generation of young people that have never had the opportunity to solve their own problems,” he noted. “They don’t seem to have as much grit as previous generations. We have helicopter parents; kid gets anything less than an A, and not only is the kid upset, the parents are swooping in. So when it comes to something which, you know, can be a little bit more upsetting than a mouse – which is our national election and people who are being appointed – it is not at all surprising that they’re acting like that.”

“The point that I tried to make in my piece is, it’s bad enough when it happens at the undergraduate level. But when it happens in a law school, like the University of Michigan, where they had Play-Doh and bubbles and so on, it is much more serious because those kids are adults. You could maybe see it in an 18-year-old, away from home for the first time. Okay, they’re a little upset. But 23-year-olds who have gone through four years of college, and they’re still demanding Play-Doh in order to function? That’s wrong,” Banzhaf declared.

Marlow disagreed only in that he thought even high school students and college freshmen should not be coddled and infantilized this way. Banzhaf concurred with the notion that treating young adults like pre-schoolers “makes them think like pre-schoolers.”

“We have many psychological studies that say if teachers treat somebody a certain way, they’re going to tend to act that way,” Banzhaf said. “But again, I agree with you that it shouldn’t be happening at the lower levels, but it’s more serious – and then also, think of the majors. If it turns out that, in grad school, physics majors lack fortitude, history majors were wusses, geology majors were pantywaists, it wouldn’t be too serious because we don’t demand that kind of thing.”

“But when it happens to law students, it means we will have, we’re already having, a generation of wuss lawyers who cannot provide effective representation for individuals in court and agencies elsewhere,” he argued. “It means not just the individuals, but the causes – you know, so many of our important issues wind up being resolved in courts, whether that’s gun rights or transgender rights or religious liberties. So if somebody representing a religious liberty isn’t effectively represented by that lawyer, lots of people could be affected. We have important topics which are no longer being discussed, so kids are graduating from law school not knowing anything about rape or affirmative action or executions, which means not only are they ineffective, but it also means the professors who teach those courses are no longer doing that research.”

“And then, finally, the one I think you and I would be most concerned about is that we have a generation of lawyers – and also undergrads – who are so supersensitive to any words, they are obviously less respectful, less concerned about the First Amendment, more willing to censor speech, more willing to censor speakers, keep them off campus, disinvite them, shout them down when they’re there. And these law students who are going to be the presidents of universities, and faculty, and administrators, advisers, they’re going to say: ‘Well yeah, of course it may be protected by the First Amendment, but you can’t have somebody like X coming on campus and saying such horrible things about our students,’” Banzhaf warned.

Marlow mentioned a story about San Francisco’s teachers union producing an anti-Trump curriculum in which public school children are to be taught that “a racist and sexist man has become the president of our country by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base.” Confusingly, the lesson plan also advises teachers not to tell their students that Hillary Clinton lost the election.

“Well, Alex, let’s not be surprised about this,” Banzhaf responded. “This is the same generation where they grew up playing sports, but nobody ever won. Not telling them Hillary lost is like telling them that your team didn’t lose, whether you get more points – actually, they don’t even count points in many of these cases – but the kids are playing soccer or some other sport, and they tell them both sides won, and everybody gets trophies just for showing up. Well, of course they’re going to have this kind of attitude. We should not be at all surprised.”

He pointed out that the second part of his new article expressed “the hope that once Trump comes in, this can be changed, and by his pen and his bully pulpit, in what some might think of as a kind of poetic justice because he’s causing so much of this, that he can reverse it.”

In other words, Banzhaf suggested that “by cutting back on the requirements that we have to deal with rape to the point where people’s rights are upset, by cutting back on the federal pressure to stamp out every arguably racist, sexist statement on campus, and so on, we can fight back.”

“And he can use his bully pulpit and not only address topics which probably haven’t been addressed very much – like police killings, or the downside of affirmative action, or the need for religious liberty, or the other side of the transgender issue – but when he speaks out, I think he may encourage those on campus, and I mean both faculty and students, who have been silent because of the pressures,” Banzhaf added. “Once he speaks out, they may be encouraged to do so, or at the very least, it provides a basis for the discussion of topics we don’t often hear about on campus.”